Onimusha (PS2) REmake (GC)

Taking a break from the fukubukuro to talk about the present!  Or recent present.

Onimusha is a pretty fun 4 hours!  What surprised me is how currently Japan's games market constantly fumbles at the bra strap that is Western game design.  They want/need to make games that appeal to western audiences and for the most part are clueless about it.  They are also making the pretty big mistake with any artistic endeavor.  If you aren't making something that you personally like, why do you expect others to like it?  They aren't writing press releases or romance novels or madlibs where you just plug keywords in and come out with a decent product.

So with that you have Onimusha which is so Japanese it's set in Japan.  Wowzers!  It's got Takeshi Kitano as the main character.  That's great considering he's known to me for being in Wong Kar Wai films, and here he's actually speaking Japanese.  He also has an almost not useless female sidekick.  It also has minimal backtracking for a RE-style game.  It also constantly taunts you with a 20 floor challenge room that rewards you with a win-button for the final boss.  I didn't get it; I kept dying on floor 20.  I still saw the ending.

What is the deal with this soundtrack?  There's no reason it has gorgeously orchestrated pieces.  I can't believe I didn't notice it when I first tried the J-Xbox version a few years back.  I also got stuck on a puzzle that ended up not mattering.  That version also has more content, which I sort of look at now - not having played it - as needlessly diluting how perfectly brief the PS2 version is.

One more inexplicable thing about the game is it has CG by Robot.  Capcom threw tons of money at this project and the sequels (Licensing the likeness rights of a dead guy!)  The sequels also sold progressively less and I don't think anyone in the world cared about the release of the 4th game.

I screamed pretty much after starting the game that I would buy it on PSN if the pre-rendered backgrounds were re-rendered into HD.

Right after that delicious 4 hours it was Resident Evil (GC).  I still hold a small hope that my memory card with all my save data will show up, so of my 15 or so Gamecube games the ones that don't have bonus content are the ones I'm going through. 

"a comfortable journey" was way too easy.  By the end of the game I was overflowing with ammo and health supplies.  I spent the last thirty minutes using magnum rounds because I had just that many around.  Also not nearly enough things to murder or to be murdered by.  I ended up trying to do a second playthrough but my interest dropped immediately after starting. 

The most interesting thing is how RE4 ended up looking the same if not better on the same hardware as the pre-rendered stuff in REmake.  Also, more so than the Silent Hill series REmake uses the controls and camera angles as crutches for difficulty.  Guess I feel satisfied with this genre, though maybe one of these days I'll run through Alone in the Dark just for the historic purposes.